Special thanks to Adam Carlson, Alexandra Carruthers, and Jeff Diamanti for their conversations and guidance as I wrote this paper. Thanks also to the participants of the session "Infrastructure and Form" at the 2015 meeting of the ACLA, especially the organizers Joseph Jeon and Kate Marshall.The
problem I am interested in elaborating here today has to do with the difficulty
of getting a grasp on oil. From the now famous claim of Amitav Ghosh—that the
oil encounter lacks the same literary production and imaginary that bore
witness to the spice encounter—to more recent attempts to know oil or to come
to terms with living it, oil presents issues for both infrastructural and theoretical
mapping. It is a moving target. As Timothy Mitchell points out in Carbon Democracy, oil tankers can be
redirected to new ports either to avoid conflict or to seek the highest prices
(and preferably avoiding strife also means reaping higher profits). Oil’s
liquid mobility is part of what makes it a difficult target for academic study
and political action. In the face of such difficulties, the work of James
Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello devises a compellingly elegant formal solution
to petroleum’s historical “slipperiness” (Ghosh 141): The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London
(2012) takes up the Baku-Tbilisi-Cehyan pipeline as the backbone of its plot,
which, at the same time, spatially delimits the terrain of its story. This
focus has the formal effect of creating a travelogue that is at once
historically deep and politically focused. Indeed, its targeting apparatus is
primarily focused on the company now known as BP. As Marriot and
Minio-Paluello move along the same route as the crude pumped from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli
oilfield they also recount major shifts in regional power, from Soviet dominance
to the present multinational control. The lesson seems to be that the way to
grasp oil, in both a cognitive and physical sense, is through its
infrastructures just as the way to stop its crude dominance is by ceasing to
engineer, build, and expand its platforms, pump jacks, pipelines, tanker
routes, refineries, and pumping stations.

This paper falls under
the guise of what Sheena Wilson and Imre Szeman have called Petrocultures. Though
you may already be familiar with the study of energy in the humanities, I will
offer a brief overview of this emerging critical approach. Thinking about petroculture,
simply put, involves giving energy, specifically petrol, a central role within
humanities and social science frameworks. An initial task for petrocultures
is to elaborate the impasse that our petro-reliance puts us in either along the
lines of Imre Szeman’s provocative query “How to Know about Oil?” or through
our experiences of oil life as Stephanie LeMenager proposes in Living Oil
(2014). Focusing on oil means taking risks—especially that one might begin to see petrol as the source of all
conflict, the substance behind all commodities, and the reason under all global
political decision making. While cautioning against reading energy as the
prime-mover of history, Allan Stoekl writes, “the most
effective way of refusing such a reification of oil, all the while granting it
the visibility it deserves, is to write its history...It’s when we think about
what “oil history” could mean that we take a natural entity and recognize its cultural centrality” (Stoekl 2014, xii). Though oil presents itself
as critically overwhelming, responses to it should find ways to mediate the particulars of oil and the
general situation of our energy system. My aim in what follows is to take the
pipeline as an infrastructural innovation of petroculture and examine the
effects it produces as a narrative tool in The
Oil Road. I turn to the
formal innovations of writing about oil to better understand the possibilities
of oil and its limits.

Snaking across Africa,
Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, miles of pipe have
been laid in order to convey fossil fuels from the source of extraction to
refineries and distribution centres. So long as oil keeps flowing, the length
and duration of the journey does not seem to matter—each instant when oil is
fed into the mouth of the pipeline is buoyed up by the tanker and then completed
in the barrel on the other end. In The
Oil Road, the authors describe those silent seafaring tankers as “the emissaries of Azeri geology, camel trains of the
industrial age. Picking up where the pipeline leaves off, they distribute the
dark matter across the surface of the earth” (250). Whether
by rail, ocean tanker, or pipeline, the energy costs of transporting oil are
great. As Marriot and
Minio-Paluello suggest,

This global oil trade
does not just flow by itself. Every day, close to 100 million barrels of crude
are collected from zones of extraction and delivered to points of
consumption….The mass relocation of great volumes of fossil fuels requires constant
coordination of logistical and financial resources. (250)

Pipelines came into
being as part of what Fredrick Buell calls the “bootstrapped system” (Buell
2012, p. 280) of oil-capital transport: first carts and barrels, then
rail, and then pipelines. Unlike those earlier modes of conveyance, the
pipeline appears shaped by the logic of oil capital. That is, the pipeline is
shaped in the interest of a smoothness that does not require workers and can
flow evenly throughout the entire day. The authors of The Oil Road work very carefully to undo
the assumed “smoothness” of oil transport, by calling attention to its bumps,
snags, corrosions and ruptures along the way. In a review of the book, Doreen
Massey incisively claims that it depicts a “space full of obstacles”:

The Caucasus, the sea, the Alps… all have to be overcome.
Every kilometre along the pipeline route there is a metal stake, with a yellow
hat and numbers on, to mark where it is buried, itself a vast earthmoving
exercise. Every few kilometres there is a block valve, where the oil can be
shut off in an emergency, surrounded by steel and concrete. There are pumping
stations, to force the oil on and on up gradients and through mountain ranges.
The oil only flows because of all this material effort - grinding, tough, often
slow, often bitterly contested, heavy. (130)

Rather than say this outright, the authors show the reader
each painstaking step in the construction and maintenance of the Oil Road,
creating an itinerary of their journey and the petrol’s journey as well as a conceptual
map of BPs legal, economic, and cultural dealings.

The book illustrates the
struggle over the way oil moves, both as substance and as fuel. The authors
enumerate the juridical battles fought over the development and construction of
the pipeline. In “Without Having to Amend Local Laws, We Went Above or Around
Them by Using a Treaty,” they outline the legal massaging that British
Petroleum had to carry out across three countries—Azerbaijan, Georgia, and
Turkey—from two other legal contexts—the UK and the USA. These “Agreements”
circumvent local laws by “overriding all existing and future domestic law apart
from the constitutions of the states in question” (144). Furthermore, a new tax
structure was put in place to exempt the energy companies and construction
companies that worked on the pipeline. Any disputes arising would be settled by
international tribunals in Stockholm, Geneva, or London. The legal adjustments
made on behalf of energy transport define the legal maneuvering in the struggle
over the energy future. In a passage headed with the title “Burnaz, Turkey,”
Marriot and Minio-Paluello write that “People have learned from the nearby
experience of BTC and the Isken coal plant that battles must be fought early
on. New projects need to be challenged before they are approved, financed, and
planned on hard drives and flipcharts in far-off capitals” (239). The
importance of these insights into the infrastructure of post-industrial energy
systems seem worth emphasizing here: the development of energy infrastructure
displays economic, engineering, industrial, and political effort on a massive
scale. The only way to get ahead of it is to do so literally: to be ready
before hand and to map before the mappers.

The text also operates on a speculative register. At several
points along their journey the authors encounter barriers, like fences or seas.
They write, “The wells lie in
a forbidden zoneto which only our
imaginations can travel… the route we are following is obscure. It is described
only in technical manuals and industry journals, data logs and government
memos” (16). And so, Marriot and Minio-Paluello attend to the mediated nature
of every moment of their journey. Imagined moments, like when they describe the
oil tanker, the Dugi Otok, silently
gliding over the waters of the Adriatic, are no less real than when they are
able to reach out and touch the pipeline itself, and moments that seem all too
real are no less mediated!

The form of the travelogue, in the hands of Marriot and Minio-Paluello, carefully tells multiple
stories at once. The unfolding of the plot happens along the BTC pipeline,
which takes the authors through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey as they follow
the pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. Succinctly “plot”-able
on the map, the itinerary of the trip remains linear even while the authors
delve into the history of region. Indeed, some of the drama of the text arrives
from it fulfilling a promise it makes early: that the journey along the Oil
Road will pass “through the crucibles of Bolshevism and fascism, Futurism and
social democracy, through the furnaces of an industrial continent” (9). In this
manner, the descriptions of the pipe’s visibility—sometimes it is buried,
sometimes it runs through private property, sometimes it is under heavy
guard—are supplemented by other layers of the text. As Marriot and
Minio-Paluello recount stories of their previous visits to the region, they
describe the development of the pipeline as technology, and offer a political
history of the area from its soviet days through to its corporate present. In
one particular instance they describe the seizure of Rijeka, a port city with a
large refinery, in 1919 by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who arrived
“triumphantly in a red sports car at the head of a column of 297 black-shirted
Arditi followers” (265); while, in another, they turn to the “outbreak of World
War II,” when Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil, and BP, then Anglo-Persian,
“shared 57.8 of the German market,” and “all three companies provided fuel to
the Nazi state as it rearmed, re-industrialized, and established its structure
of terror” (301). BP’s web published history passes over the years spanning
1932 and 1948 in silence. These strata of thick description in The Oil Road tellingly reveal the difficulty
of knowing about energy infrastructure. Travelling the route of oil surely
offers a place to start, but the book also suggests that more time is needed to
grasp the magnitude of energy extraction and transport. The
missing years and the strata of thick history The Oil Road make available arrive through its own familiarity with
the oil archive--they are reading industry journals, promo materials, investor
updates, and so on. This effort tells us about the genres of writing that oil
both traffics in—engineering tracts, investor opinion, public promotion, CEO
biographies—and the types of approach that a materialist critique of energy
must navigate in order to register as mapping at all. In a sense, it’s a kind
of political realism.

As members of Platform London—a collective that combines
research, artistic practice, and activism—Marriot and Minio-Paluello have the
experience, contacts, and resources to undertake the more than five thousand
kilometer long journey along the path of oil. As reviewer Terry Macalister
points out, they “know the industry from a decade of campaigning against it.” A
part of these resources means that they have been able to work to devise a
theoretical map to match the infrastructural one traced in the book. In the
prologue, they write:

Our experience, gained
over years of researching BTC, has taught us that such a massive project is not
carried out by one company, BP, but rather by a network of bodies, which we
have come to call the Carbon Web. Around the oil corporation are gathered
institutions that enable it to conduct its business. These include public and
private banks, government ministries and military bodies, engineering companies
and legal firms, universities and environmental consultants, non-governmental
organizations, and cultural institutions. All of these make up the Carbon Web
that drives forward the extraction, transportation, and consumption of fossil
fuels. In our attempt to explore and unravel this network, we will not only
travel through the landscape of the pipelines, but also investigate the
topography of bodies most responsible for this contemporary Oil Road. (6)

Here is The Carbon Web designed by Platform London and
charted in The Oil Road. The Oil Road seems to move a step beyond
the assumed limits to representing oil. This is a difficult feat and great
accomplishment, but I would like to suggest that the book does not stop there.
As slippery as oil is or can be, by taking it as the structuring force of its
plot and the ground of its story The Oil
Road effectively begins to figure the larger structure lurking in the
background—that other, much more difficult to grasp totality: the mode of
production itself. The Carbon Web bears a striking resemblance to Fredric
Jameson’s revision of the Marxist schema of base and superstructure. Where,

the
more narrowly economic—the forces of production, the labor process, technical
development, or relations of production, such as the functional interrelation
of social classes—is, however privileged, not identical with the mode of
production as a whole, which assigns this narrowly “economic” level its
particular function and efficiency as it does all the others. (36)

Jameson
goes on to say that, if one were to consider this a structuralism it is a
structuralism where there is only one structure “namely the mode of production
itself…, it is not a part of the whole or one of the levels, but rather the
entire system of relationships among those levels” (36). What we get then, in The Oil Road, is the start of a mapping
of the mode of production from the standpoint of energy.

In closing, I’d like to make reference to a conversation
that has been unfolding recently under the heading of Paranoid Subjectivity on e-flux. I want to attempt to avoid the
risk, as Sarah Brouillette puts it, of “simply mapping the mapmakers” by
emphasizing “capitalism’s mysteriousness and intractability, […] our incapacity
in the face of it, [or] our anxiety about our incapacity, and so forth.” To
avoid this risk, Brouillette implores us to foreground “the importance of a given map’s relationship to struggle.”
The practicality of Marriot and Minio-Paluello’s map lies in its dialectic
between infrastructure and form. Where the occasion of the pipeline presents a
through line for plot, the tale of the Oil Road enables the story of the Carbon
Web. In this sense, the text’s careful development of BP’s connections as a
totality is central to its political usefulness. The labour and the maintenance
of such roads comprised of pumps, steel tubes, security fences, security
personnel, spouts, gauges, monitoring devices, tanker ships, refineries, more
steel tubes, more spouts, more security personnel, delivery trucks, gas pumps,
and on and on, is a very real, ongoing kind of work. Marriot and Minio-Plauello
show us this work, which in a way helps us to understand the scope of the task
at hand and to locate crucial starting places to begin to dismantle the Oil
Road and the Carbon Web it weaves.

works citedBuell, Fredrick. “A Short History of Oil
Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance.” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012): 273-293.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

LeMenager, Stephanie.

Living
Oil: Petroleum in the American Century.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.

Macalister, Terry. “The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian
Sea to the City of London by James Marriott and Mika
Minio-Paluello – review.” The Guardian.
14 December 2012. Web. 24 March 2015.Marriot, James and Mika Minio-Paluello. The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea
to the City of London. London: Verso, 2013.Massey, Doreen. "Mapping the Carbon Web." Soundings54 (Summer 2013): 127-130.Szeman, Imre.

“How to Know About Oil: Energy Epistemologies
and Political Futures.” Journal of Canadian Studies 47.3 (2013): 145-168.